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Analyses of roll call votes claim that the European Parliament is increasingly becoming a 'normal' parliament in which transnational party groups compete in a low-dimensional ideological space dominated by the classic socio-economic left-right conflict. This paper assesses the validity of this claim by comparing roll-call voting behavior in the European Parliament against preferences of legislators as expressed in the 1996 Members of European Parliament Survey. The results corroborate that low-dimensional ideological competition drives the behavior of parliamentarians to a substantial degree. The individual ideological convictions of parliamentarians are an important independent source of their voting behavior. Moreover, there is no evidence that gatekeeping institutions artificially suppress one or more important dimensions of policy contestation. Finally, European party groups are indeed effective in swaying legislators towards their ideal points. Previous research has, however, overstated the importance of socio- economic conflict to the detriment of value-based libertarian-traditional contestation.

The liberal international economic order has been facing high-profile legitimacy challenges in recent years. This article puts these challenges in historical context through a systematic analysis of rhetorical challenges towards both the order per se and specific global economic institutions. Drawing on Albert Hirschman's classic typology of exit, voice and loyalty, we coded leaders' speeches in the General Debate at the UN General Assembly between 1970 and 2018 as articulating intentions to abandon elements of the order, challenges or calls for reform, unequivocal support, or factual mentions of cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that explicit criticisms towards the liberal order are at an all-time low and that exit threats remain rare. An analysis of the historical evolution of criticisms to global economic institutions reveals a move away from the Cold War insider-outsider conflict towards insider contestation. For example, we find that as countries' economies become more open, their leaders expressed more support for global economic institutions during the Cold War but less support since. Finally, we demonstrate consistency between the public policy positions leaders announce in UNGA General Debate speeches and their government positions on consequential reform debates on debt relief. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11558-020-09404-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.